BAKU, Azerbaijan, October 22. Azerbaijan will be able to prepare around 60% of its state budget through electronic forecasting in the coming years, Finance Minister Sahil Babayev said, Trend's correspondent reports from the event.
Babayev made the remarks on Thursday at a conference in Baku dedicated to the digital transformation of public finance.
He said Azerbaijan was implementing a comprehensive set of measures to build a digital state and digitize public services, public procurement, public finance and budget forecasting.
According to the minister, the president has approved a relevant state program and action plan for digitalization. A council has also been established to coordinate work in this area during the current and coming years and beyond.
Babayev noted that the council, chaired by First Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva, would coordinate digitalization initiatives across all areas of the country's economic, public and social life.
He stressed that the Finance Ministry's main objective was not simply to move public services online, but to integrate them into a unified electronic portal and ecosystem.
“The key approach is not the degree to which individual services have been digitized, but rather the provision of various public and public finance services within a unified framework through a single electronic portal and ecosystem,” he said.
Babayev said the Digital Public Finance Information System had been established under a presidential decree, and implementation of several of its components and subcomponents had begun this year.
The unified system will create opportunities for data-driven decision-making, forecasting and analysis in public finance, he said. Integrating various subsystems into a common framework and linking their data will help improve the effectiveness of public finance policy.
Speaking about ongoing digitalization projects, the minister highlighted the electronic accounting component being developed under the Government Resource Planning (GRP) approach, which provides for unified digital resource management across the public sector.
Work on the component has begun, and the system is being rolled out in stages. Since August, more than 260 government agencies have received relevant training, while the process of fully digitizing their accounting reports has also started.
“We plan to register more than 2 million inventory items in the unified electronic accounting system by the end of the year, thereby establishing the relevant database,” Babayev said.
He added that the process would cover all public sector organizations starting next year. In his view, it should be possible to establish a unified register within approximately three years, enabling the fully electronic accounting of public funds, state assets and non-financial assets in Azerbaijan.
The minister said the register was expected to be integrated with electronic contract, treasury and budget systems. This would bring public finance data together on a single platform and allow for more accurate budget planning.
“If forecasting is carried out through this register, we believe that around 60% of the state budget could be prepared on the basis of electronic forecasting in the coming years. Once the relevant data have been consolidated in a single database, electronic forecasting could be used for 60% of the state budget,” he stressed.